Your Children, the Credit-Default Swaps

The New York Times continues to do fine work debunking for-profit education models. My father was a public-school teacher, and a member of that union, for 35 years, even though he hated unions, which is another story for another day. There are more than a few problems with them, but, dammit, the fact that the likes of Bill Gates and Joe Klein and even Bill Clinton find them a nuisance is not one of them. They are literally the only thing standing between most American children and this particularly terrifying prospect:

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"What we're talking about here is the financialization of public education," said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. "These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages."